Overview

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aime Cesaire, and Issa Samb. ""Fugitive time"" names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release, but instead sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City to Sun Ra's transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression.

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9781478020615

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Fugitive Time represents the strength of diasporic thinking around a range of black aesthetic production that disrupts the Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist binary through visions and understanding of time beyond the historical. By positing black aesthetics as the site of black theory and political thought, Matthew Omelsky demonstrates that alternate temporalities are the key to understanding blackness, embodied experience, aesthetics, and history. -- Samantha Pinto, author of * Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights *

Author Information

Matthew Omelsky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

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